Around the Corner

On the afternoon of Thursday August 14, 2003 some 50+ million people in eight states and the province of Ontario lost power. Known as the Northeast Blackout of 2003, this event was the largest blackout in North American history. According to Scientific American, the blackout caused 11 deaths and cost approximately $6 billion.

The events that caused the blackout have been investigated and we've learned that the electrical power grid on which we depend for necessities like lights and heat is really quite fragile. The grid barely meets our current needs and, because it is based on 20th century technologies, our ability to manage it is limited.

As a response to what we learned from events like the Notheast Blackout of 2003 and as a key step toward energy independence, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act contains funding for the SmartGrid Investment Grant Program under the Department of Energy's Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability. The SmartGrid is an update of the 20th century power grid with 21st century technology. Smart metering, reliable and secure transmission and clean energy generation are all part of the SmartGrid.

So how do we create the SmartGrid with updated 21st century technologies? As Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra remarked in his recent speech at the Churchill Club in Silicon Valley, while there's a lot of work to be done, the government's most appropriate level of influence is to support a collaborative approach to standards that will ensure we have a level playing field to deliver game changing innovation.

Standards serve as both a mechanism to constrain costs and as a platform for innovation. Although this statement may seem to be a paradox, collaborative, or open, standards can achieve both by creating the right kind of competition. That is, competition based on delivering better features that give consumers choice in products as well as encouraging mobility and interoperability across producers. Broad participation by producers, both social and economic, as well as the transparent nature of an open standard drives game changing innovation. And open standards bodies remove or reduce barriers to entry (like membership fees) and publish standards openly so social producers can compete with economic producers on a level playing field.

Smart consumers will benefit from standards. IEEE 802.15.4-2003 is one such standard. It is used to specify the physical layer and media access control for low-rate wireless and personal area networks used in home automation devices. On the SmartGrid, home automation devices using smart metering based on IEEE 802.15.4-2003 will inform smart consumers when they can save money on their electrical bill. Imagine a consumer who uses their mobile phone to display smart metering information from their personal area network to avoid peak load costs. Smart!

As a CIO, standards are all around me. They are the DNA of our operations. When applied well, open standards allow Federal agencies to reduced costs and as a platform for innovation.

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The Aspen Institute holds its annual Ideas Festival each summer. This year the festival was held from June 29 though July 5. The 2009 Festival theme was, “Ideas That Work,” and had four tracks: World Affairs and the Global Economy; Arts and Culture; Life in America; and Managing Planet Earth.

The Festival gathers recognizable leaders, thinkers and doers at the Institute to share their ideas. Traditional media outlets typically provide limited coverage of the Festival. This year my favorite magazine, The Atlantic, is running a special ideas report and recently the Festival started sharing ideas through a video library.

This year there's a twist. Because sharing ideas widely is as important as being at the Festival, the Institute is extending its reach by recruiting at least 140 attendees to share ideas from the Festival through Twitter. (The number 140 is relevant because Twitter updates are limited to no more than 140 characters.)

You can track and share open ideas from the Festival by searching Twitter, using the search term #AIF09. This search string is called a “hashtag,” denoted by the pound sign at the beginning. Prior to the Festival, organizers established this hashtag to give everyone a common reference point to track updates from the Festival on Twitter.

There are other ways to track ideas from the Festival too. Because of Twitter's 140 character limit, users abbreviate the ideas they share as memes. The term meme was first introduced by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 best seller the Selfish Gene. Memes are units of cultural information with specific meaning that are replicated throughout a culture. Memes can be abbreviations or terms whose interpretation requires tacit knowledge.

"Chimerica" is a good example of a meme used at the Festival. Chimerica was coined by Harvard historian Niall Ferguson to describe "China's strategy of dollar reserve accumulation that has financed America's debt habit." By simply searching Twitter on Chimerica, you’ll find Tweets from all the attendees that used that meme in a Tweet.

Twist provides a graphical view of Tweets containing a meme. Enter Chimerica in Twist and you will see a time series plot of Chimerica Tweets. Twist also displays the Chimerica Tweets in a list below the plot. Mouse over the plot and select a specific point in time to browse the Tweets.

Tweets are an excellent way to share ideas. Whether through hashtags established as a convention or by plotting the time series of memes, you can be part of the Aspen 140: Open Ideas Project.

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Each day in the workplace we hear the sound of the fluorescent lights around us and the fans in the computers under our desks. We smell pop corn cooking down the hallway. We might be too cold, or too hot. We subconsciously filter most of these stimuli; others may be more difficult to filter, some directly affect our productivity.

We often assume that technology is our primary source of productivity. Workplace design, or what architects sometimes call the built environment, can also be a source of productivity. Light, color, sound and comfort have been shown to enhance productivity. Vivian Loftness, University Professor and Head, School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, in her presentation on Sustainable Design for Health and Productivity describes how factors such as health, reading comprehension and task execution can all be improved through ventilation, natural light and temperature control. Professor Loftness and her team of researchers have identified more than 100 studies that scientifically link physical infrastructure to organizational performance. Better surroundings result in less use of sick leave, lower expenses on health claims, and productivity increases. The salary and benefit costs of people in an office building are typically 10 to 12 times greater than the cost of the building’s real estate and utility costs, so the potential return for smart design choices upfront is significant. (see GSA’s WorkPlace Matters, p.8)

GSA’s Public Buildings Service has a lot of fabulous research on productive workplaces. The PBS Workspace Delivery Program has published interior basics, a framework for designing functional, flexible, healthful and sustainable places for federal employees to work. I’ve written before about the need for innovation in management practices, to move beyond the industrial-era approach and maximize the productivity of today’s knowledge workers (a term coined by Peter Drucker in 1959). We need innovative design for our offices as well. The old model, where more space and better furniture is given to more senior employees, holds little appeal to modern workers and does not address the complex and fluid nature of work today. The Workspace Delivery Program has adopted a structured, balanced scorecard-based approach to designing spaces for GSA’s federal clients. You can read a few of their success stories with clients such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, US Coast Guard, and the Department of Energy.

So what are the implications for us? The link between physical infrastructure and a high-performance organization is real. A well-designed workplace offers great potential to improve organizational performance and realize financial return far greater than the initial investment. Thoughtful design that integrates with our work rather than impedes it, makes it possible for all of us to be productive in place.

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Thanks to everyone who helped plan and execute as well as those who attended this year's Management of Change Conference. I believe our experience together with Vivek Kundra, Clay Shirky, Rob Carey and Aneesh Chopra was truly transformative. And I hope those who were not able to attend will search Twitter on our hashtag #MOC to follow our tweet stream. Feel free to retweet or share your thoughts here.

Over the next few posts I'll share my thoughts on topics covered by the speakers. I'll start with Aneesh Chopra, Federal Chief Technology Officer, whose role is to foster technology related economic development. If you haven't heard Aneesh, be sure to watch this video from January's State of the Net Conference, sponsored by the Congressional Internet Caucus. He's a truly inspiring speaker.

As GCN's Wyatt Kash describes here, Aneesh revealed his early plans on open standards, crowd sourcing, cyber security and government research and development. One of his key priorities is to identify “game-changing” innovations that improve government performance dramatically rather than incrementally. As an example, Aneesh referred to a recent partnership between the Commonwealth of Virginia and NASA Langley to upgrade the Viriginia high school physics curriculum. The curriculum had not been updated in many years and topics such as nanotechnology were not adequately covered. Through an open, collaborative process, the group developed and launched the “21st Century Physics Flexbook,” in a matter of months rather than years as would normally be the case, and at almost no cost to taxpayers.

Aneesh also spoke extensively about the importance of the government's research and development mission. So, just some R&D background for my readers. In previous posts I mentioned the World Economic Forum's Global Information Technology and Global Competitiveness reports. These reports show wide ranging outcomes from research and development policy. How a policy differentiates research from development, basic from applied research and private sector from public sector investment strongly affect Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The National Science Board, part of the National Science Foundation maintains, annually, a report called the Science and Engineering Indicators that provide insights into national and international trends in R&D. Although U.S. R&D spending has fallen to about 2.6% of GDP, the U.S. maintains a very competitive position in R&D. The U.S. spends more than any other nation on R&D and more than the entire G7 nations. A few other nations like Brazil, India and China are increasing R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP. Private sector investment is a very large percent of U.S. R&D funding, upwards of 70%. Private sector expenditures focus on development. About 60% of U.S. basic research is conducted is universities and most of that is Federally funded. U.S. R&D is geographically concentrated. Four states - California, Massachusetts, Texas and Illinois perform more than 70% of all computer and electronics R&D. The U. S. is the leading source of new patent inventions compared with Europe and Asia. Finally, multinational corporation's R&D expenditures outside their own country continue to rise. Overseas R&D by U.S. multinationals is shifting away from Europe to emerging Asian markets.

It's a very nice report, and I highly recommend it. However, as Aneesh pointed out, it is difficult to capture and measure the return on investment from R&D spending. He also mentioned the need to capture outcome metrics that help us understand the benefits accrued from R&D.

Welcome Aneesh Chopra and thanks again to all who participated in this year's Management of Change Conference!

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